EQUITIES
Foreigners buy NT$48.5bn
Foreign investors last week bought a net NT$48.5 billion (US$1.76 billion) of local shares after buying a net NT$19.53 billion a week earlier, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement yesterday. As of Thursday, foreign investors had sold an accumulated NT$454.09 billion of local shares since the beginning of last year, it said. Last week, the top three shares bought by foreign investors were United Microelectronics Corp (聯電), Innolux Corp (群創) and China Airlines Ltd (中華航空), while the top three sold were AcBel Polytech Inc (康舒科技), Kinpo Electronics Inc (金寶電子) and Walton Advanced Engineering Inc (華東科技), the exchange said. As of Thursday, the market capitalization of shares held by foreign investors was NT$24.44 trillion, or 43.48 percent of total market capitalization, it said.
SEMICONDUCTORS
CHPT revenue up 26.69%
Chunghwa Precision Test Technology Co (CHPT, 中華精測), a supplier of probe cards used for silicon wafer testing, yesterday reported that its revenue grew 26.69 percent annually to NT$423 million last month, the second-highest monthly sales figure in the company’s history. Customers were stockpiling 5G chips and market demand for high-performance computing chips rebounded, the company said. Last month’s figure boosted its fourth-quarter revenue 14.8 percent to NT$1.27 billion, from NT$1.11 billion in the third quarter. For the whole of last year, revenue edged up 0.78 percent to a record NT$4.24 billion from NT$4.21 billion in 2020.
SEMICONDUCTORS
TMC buys back 4.5m shares
Taiwan Mask Corp (TMC, 台灣光罩), a supplier of photomasks used to make semiconductors for silicon wafers, yesterday said it had bought back 4.485 million of its own shares over the past two months for NT$413 million. The number of repurchased shares accounted for 74.75 percent of the shares that the firm had planned to acquire on the open market to bolster its share price, TMC said in a regulatory filing. On Nov. 4, TMC began the buyback scheme, aiming to repurchase up to 6 million shares at NT$62 to NT$110 per share. The average repurchase price was NT$92.25, compared with the firm’s closing share price of NT$108 yesterday.
ELECTRONICS
Ichia’s annual revenue rises
Ichia Technologies Inc (毅嘉科技) yesterday reported revenue of NT$539 million for last month, an annual decline of 3 percent, due to a shortage of raw materials and the effects of inventory adjustments. Sales generated from flexible printed circuit integrated components reached NT$389 million last month, accounting for 72.17 percent of total sales, with the remainder coming from mechanical integrated components, it said. Despite the shortage of raw materials, Ichia reported consolidated revenue of NT$6.48 million for last year, up 17.73 percent from 2020 and the highest in three years.
STANDING HEAD
Microsoft releases e-mail fix
Microsoft Corp on Sunday offered a solution to a bug that caused some e-mail messages to become stuck on its Exchange platforms due to what it said was a New Year-related date-checking failure. The problem was not security-related, the company said in a blog post. A subsequent update gave two fixes, one that could be applied to all of a client’s servers and another that needed to be applied manually to individual servers. The bug caused messages to get stuck in transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019, it said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) secured a record 70.2 percent share of the global foundry business in the second quarter, up from 67.6 percent the previous quarter, and continued widening its lead over second-placed Samsung Electronics Co, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Monday. TSMC posted US$30.24 billion in sales in the April-to-June period, up 18.5 percent from the previous quarter, driven by major smartphone customers entering their ramp-up cycle and robust demand for artificial intelligence chips, laptops and PCs, which boosted wafer shipments and average selling prices, TrendForce said in a report. Samsung’s sales also grew in the second quarter, up
LIMITED IMPACT: Investor confidence was likely sustained by its relatively small exposure to the Chinese market, as only less advanced chips are made in Nanjing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) saw its stock price close steady yesterday in a sign that the loss of the validated end user (VEU) status for its Nanjing, China, fab should have a mild impact on the world’s biggest contract chipmaker financially and technologically. Media reports about the waiver loss sent TSMC down 1.29 percent during the early trading session yesterday, but the stock soon regained strength and ended at NT$1,160, unchanged from Tuesday. Investors’ confidence in TSMC was likely built on its relatively small exposure to the Chinese market, as Chinese customers contributed about 9 percent to TSMC’s revenue last
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